


a keen eye

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-06 02:48:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11027016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: Selena Ulric specializes in profiling the upper echelon of Niflheim through the simple act ofwatching. Ravus isn't quite sure how to hide from her.





	a keen eye

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kouaka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kouaka/gifts).



He didn’t say a word. Merely glared and hoped that the look said everything about his displeasure on his voice’s behalf. She rolled her eyes and scoffed.

“Well, if you had woken up _properly_ the first time I kicked you, I wouldn’t have had to do it four more times.”

His bruised side did not accept that skewed logic. Especially since he had, in fact, been awake since the first kick. (He hadn’t slept the night. Hard to sleep when he was on a timetable.) But the Ulric girl didn’t do anything by halves. If the first attempt did not yield the correct results, she attempted again – and again and again – until her efforts yielded the appropriate outcome. Bodily functions of the victim be damned.

“Don’t hurt him too bad. He’s a very valuable asset.”

“Captain Drautos? Is that you? Finally skinned my brother and wore him as a suit?”

Nyx snorted and smirked, and Ravus thought to himself, _If only that were true_. The only reason he tolerated these juvenile antics from the Kingsglaive’s terrible duo – and, occasionally, _trio_ when Altius made her unfortunate cameos – was due to his respect for their captain. Drautos was a man of discipline; all severe lines and sharp edges. He honed his Glaive like a blade, settling for nothing less than brutal efficiency from each and every soldier that sharpened its edge. The man’s capacity for command was wasted in Lucis. Ravus always thought that he would make a far better Nif.

So, it was Drautos he kept in mind as he grit his teeth and endured Selena’s snickering. And he thought of his own sister, whose safety and potential freedom was all but ensured by this alliance. For that – and _only_ that – he did owe Selena.

Selena Ulric was not a soldier. While the faction had been conceived as an elite military unit – over-powered infantrymen was really all it boiled down to – the Kingsglaive had evolved over the years. Tiers had developed as its members deviated into ranks the better developed they became with the King’s magic. And specialists were nudged into position when particular affinities benefitted the Crown more than being tossed as pawns for the MT firing squads to devour beyond the Wall.

Selena was one-such specialist. She had enlisted into the Kingsglaive with her brother because, like most of the refugees pouring into Insomnia the year of its inception, she had nowhere else to go. But she didn’t take to the royal magic like Nyx did. She didn’t take to many of the necessities expected of a soldier like Nyx did. She was such a poor recruit, in fact, that she was very nearly discharged from her service.

Her survival in the Kingsglaive was reliant on a combination of boycotting from Nyx – the siblings were a packaged deal; they couldn’t have one without the other, and they _really_ wanted Nyx after he was one of the few recruits to display an exceptional affinity for the royal gifts – and the discovery that, while not an exceptional soldier, Selena was exceptional in a different spectrum that was just as valuable to the war effort.

She was a human index for political players and the psychology behind their motivations. A discovery made entirely by accident – or so Nyx had told him. They were watching a broadcast in the Glaive commons about the pending union between a duchess of Accordo and one of Niflheim’s senators to strengthen the tenuous relationship between both countries. Libertus had been mumbling about how this was just another bullet lodged in Lucis’s shield when she made the most ridiculous, yet frighteningly _certain_ assumption any of them had ever heard.

“It won’t last. She’s gay and sleeping with the ambassador of Tenebrae.”

They’d laughed and she’d turned red with indignation, and proceeded to point out a series of miniscule gestures, documented from various television appearances, that supported her theory. A little over a month later, the headlines were splashed red with scandal and Drautos reworked her enlistment into the Kingsglaive as a political analyst rather than an infantryman. She watched the newsfeed, read the reports, gathered gossip, and picked through all of it for the unsaid truths that granted Lucis valuable information that payed for the allegiances of a few key players beyond the Wall.

The most recent allegiance being from Ravus.

“Captain in disguise or not, he has a point,” Ravus grumbled, presently.

“Don’t let it go to your head,” Nyx said, pacing the edge of the haven while his two companions cleared the camping gear from the night before.

Ravus had been trading intelligence with the Kingsglaive for a few months now. It was delicate, and sometimes tedious, work. The Glaive had approached him in the middle of the battlefield, and that was often where they met hence the deal he’d made with them. Selena had picked him out as a potential ally by something so simple, so trivial, so _entirely unconscious_ that Ravus had been baffled when she explained the circumstances of their interest in him well after the fact.

_His glare_.

“You were never a keen supporter of the Empire before Tenebrae was attacked,” she’d told him at the end of one of their earlier correspondences. “And, honestly, it’s written all over your face that being put under their sovereignty didn’t change that. You’ve only been following orders because there’s nothing else to do. And I imagine your sister plays no small part in that.”

He remembered bristling against her observations. He remembered the tiny string of panic that wound through him because, if she could read him so clearly, who was to say the agents of Niflheim couldn’t, too? But there was an empathy to her pragmatic brown stare that soothed some of the nerves about compromising his position as their new informant.

Selena approached her marks with a less suspicious view than Niflheim’s spies might have. The Empire looked at broad strokes – where did you go, who did you see, what did you say. Selena, he was only just beginning to learn, looked for the minutiae of a person’s actions. Infinitesimal _gestures_ ; things that he just did without even thinking that there was a greater meaning to them. Like the measure of his steps, the way he held his head, the deliberate absence of a smile, where his glances set or did not set in a crowded room.

“Hey, I get it,” she had murmured to him on another occasion – they met for brief, rehearsed exchanges on the fields far and flung between their rival territories. “If my brother was in your sister’s place, my loyalties would be with the thumb pinning him down, too.”

He didn’t know if this was just her way of humanizing herself to him, trying to make him trust her more… or if she actually meant it. Words were easy enough to say without fulfilling the actions they described. But as time passed, and he was made victim to the Ulrics combined antagonizing, he could recognize the adoration between the two of them as his own for Lunafreya.

“Okay!” Selena said, stretching her back and shading her eyes as she looked out over the deserted lands beneath the haven. “How much further to this one?”

“Just past that ridge,” Ravus said, pointing to a spine of land a few miles off. “The drop should have taken place an hour ago. You should have one more until the reciprocating agent comes to claim it.”

Selena nodded in the direction Ravus indicated. The information they pilfered from this spot would aid them in anticipating some of the Empire’s strategy. Would spare many Lucian lives in an already suffering military force.

“Well, this is where we part ways for now,” Selena said, turning to Ravus and outstretching her hand. “Until next time, Moonshine.”

Ravus wrinkled his nose, as he always did at this nickname she had stamped on him. And she only smirked, as she always did, and waited expectantly for him to shake her hand. Like he always did. Because it was only polite.


End file.
